Ketchup

That thing you use to drown your food? That condiment that grace notes the glory of fried food? My BIL's favorite restaurant condiment?

Nope, just a new blog post that trims the strands remaining in the end of January and neatly blanket stitches the edge. I am in a crafting frame of mind but don't have an immediate project to hand, so I am YouTube daydreaming through art journals and handmade beads and funny felt creatures and breaking out the sewing metaphors. Also, plotting a drive to Half Price because January's TBR? Yeah. Too chewy.

To all my former writer's group friends who suffered through my allusive and weird drafts? Your revenge is at hand. Repeat after me in your best Inigo Montoya voice:  You killed my patience, prepare to read Moonwise.

Moonwise is the epitome of my January TBR. I'd picked it up once upon a time after encountering mention of it that promised a love-it-or-loathe-it but rewarding read for those who could make it through. It sounded exactly like something I would love and the first few pages intrigued me. Who is this woman who has shown up at a friend's house? Why is she desperate? What is she hoping this visit will accomplish? Also, what a lovely, atmospheric beginning.

Then...well...things happen. Maybe. Or...other things happen. I'm not British, so those things are seriously opaque to me. Are these women who have just graduated from university? Are they middle-aged? What, exactly, is a "hallows?"

I find myself reading a page, skimming back over it and just trudging forward through another sentence, numb. It's winter in the story and there are witches. Maybe. There's definitely snow. The reading experience seems to chime with the experience of one of the characters, a variety of confusion in which you become sincerely grateful for an interlude regarding the local goats because you know what a goat is and THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT.

Despite the slow going, I find myself wondering if I would have enjoyed this closer to the time I found it. Before I'd read Harry Potter, before I'd tried to write a half-dozen abandoned novels, before I'd moved so thoroughly into the Fezzbook and YouTube weeds that my reading habits atrophied. Before my TBR exploded with tons of used book stress-buys. This is to say that I think this is a book that rewards being treated like a lake to be explored rather a backyard lap pool. When you set yourself up to read it as part of a large pile of other books by the end of a given month, I guess you deserve to find that it slaps you in the face and sucks you down into a slough of text from which your preserved body will emerge in the data stream years hence with no indication of what happened except that you fell in a book and drowned, trying to treat a lake like a lap pool.

Soon...not today, perhaps tomorrow...I'm going to go questing for a copy of The Alienist or Poor Things or The Left Hand of Darkness or...manga? Maybe that would be a good shift for February's TBR stack. There will be stacks of not-new novels and a sunny afternoon to explore the shelves and, lurking in the background, a dark lake of a novel waiting for my attention.